Throughout my four years at Olin, I have had the privilege of participating in SERV as a general member, Honor Board as Chair, and CORe as Vice President. This means that I have also served on the Executive Board (E-Board) for two years. The E-Board is a little-known group that consists of the heads of SERV, SAC, SAO, HB, and CORe and that helps allocate the student activities fund and coordinate elections and other related activities.

In each of these positions, I have noticed things that could be changed for the better. Over time, each of the groups has done its best to tinker at the edges and make these changes where it could. For example, the election format has gotten progressively easier and more visible over time. Unfortunately, due to overly rigid charters for the organizations, this has also meant that we sometimes make changes we do not technically have the authority to make. Surprisingly enough, one of the more glaring omissions in the current CORe charter, established in 2010, is a total lack of a process for making amendments.

That’s why, starting last semester, CORe, in conjunction with the other student leadership groups, started contemplating the idea of rewriting everything from scratch. This process has produced a proposal for a new model of student government that we believe will be more flexible, streamlined, and cohesive.

The new model is summarized in the graphic at the bottom of the following page. The current model is also included for comparison. However, after months of discussions and planning, there are enough details to fill a few dozen Frankly Speaking articles (the entire proposal is twenty pages long). In this article I have chosen to include only a few of the most important details as follows:

• The E-Board has been eliminated, folding their role into the combined Student Government to help increase transparency. Since you probably didn’t even know the E-Board existed, you probably will not be bothered by its disappearance.

• SAC and SAO (renamed to Committee for Clubs and Organizations [CCO] in the proposal) have been expanded to help take some of the load off of these positions. SERV, on the other hand, has been condensed (read more about SERV’s change of structure in the following article “SERV Update and Restructuring”). The Honor Board will not change at all.

• In addition to the class representatives, five new representatives will meet directly with some of Olin’s administrative departments. These representatives will be liaisons to the Office of Student Affairs and Resources, Admissions, Marketing and Communications, Development, Family and Alumni Relations, the Collaboratory, the BOW Collaboration, Curriculum and Faculty, and Operations. This will serve to increase communication between faculty, staff, and students.

So, what will this new plan do for you? Honestly, in the short term, things will go on pretty much the same as they always have. The largest changes will be in how responsive the Student Government can be to new ideas. Hopefully, this new group can become a catalyst for communication amongst the entire Olin community.

At this point, we want to hear from you. We have collectively produced a document that outlines our intended changes in greater detail, along with the rationale behind each change, which will be sent out soon. Please, look it over and give us feedback. There will be a Town Hall meeting on Thursday, March 5th where we hope to put these changes to a vote.

Is there a change we missed? Did we change something you like? Let us know. There will be a variety of formal feedback sessions in the coming weeks – or you could just chat it up here in the dining hall. The student government might not really be broken, but we can make it better.

(Disclaimer: I hope that some of the discussions on race and future actions by Olin pertaining to race will be beneficial across the board. That said, Matt Huang’s article “Racial Challenges at Olin” speaks more specifically to challenges faced by Asian/Asian-American students here, and it’s on Frankly Speaking’s website if you would like to check it out.)

Congratulations, Olin! You did the gender thing. It’s great. But what about the race thing?

Olin’s a pretty determinedly colorblind place. Colorblind admissions, colorblind team dynamics, people here love to talk about diversity and its benefits, as long as it doesn’t involve skin color. But racial diversity is a demonstrable asset in situations that involve teamwork and creativity. Sound familiar?

A HuffPost article by David Goldberg and Mark Somerville on diversity in engineering demonstrates a common tendency to brush over matters of race. They mention it briefly, but emphasize the importance of gender, personality, and aspirational diversity. These are all good things to have, of course, but they certainly are not more important than racial diversity in a historically discriminatory field. And this refusal to talk about race and treat it as important is an unfortunate trend here at Olin.

Maybe you’d like to cut the college a little slack. After all, it is a private school, and under no obligation to be racially diverse. Except that it sort of is, especially if you read the founding precepts, or any publicity material centering on how we ‘pioneer creative innovation.’

The precepts are self-described by the F. W. Olin Foundation as “the principles upon which the College was established as well as the Foundation’s hopes for what the College will accomplish and the good that it will do.” The third precept, only surpassed by ‘must be named after Olin’ and ‘must offer only engineering,’ is this: “from among the students who qualify [academically], the College shall endeavor to develop as diverse a student community as is possible.” The first axis of diversity named is race, and the second is gender. How did we end up skimming over that first one and then awarding ourselves monumental back-pats for a 50/50 gender balance?

There is a reason I implicated Olin’s pride-in-innovation as a commitment to racial diversity. A lot of research around diversity and team performance suggests that if Olin really wants to produce the best ideas and the best teammates, it should take a hard look at diversity. Teams with variation along any axis – race, gender, even politics – outperform homogenous ones simply because different types of diversity give people unique perspectives and experiences, the lenses through which we generate ideas. Furthermore, if the variation presents visually (as race and gender often do), so much the better: not only do different identities and perspectives bring more ideas to the team, but perceived differences among teammates cause team members to think more about team topics and have deeper, more productive discussions at meetings. Especially in matters of creativity and – wait for it – innovation. Diversity is an asset, not an obligation.

Interested in reading more on this? Katherine Phillips’ article “How Diversity Makes Us Stronger” in Scientific American (online) is a good place to start.

Want to hear more? Next month’s issue of Frankly Speaking will feature a follow-up to this article.

You may have heard that the Dining Hall now composts our leftover food, a terrific step to reduce the amount of waste that ends up in landfills. But the issue of food waste is much more deeply ingrained into our society. Here’s a fairly shocking statistic: 40% of food produced in the US goes to waste. That’s 20 lbs per person per month. Half of these losses are difficult to control, because crops are lost to disease, weather, or quality standards. But we can do something about the other 50% of food waste – the consumer waste that we create.

Olin’s composting program is a great start. We compost both pre-consumer waste (like vegetable scraps from the kitchen), and post-consumer waste (the leftovers on your plate). Rather than going to landfills, this food is turned to nutrient-filled soil, some of which is used in the garden here at Olin.

But for all the benefits of composting, it doesn’t actually reduce the amount of wasted food. When food goes to waste, the resources used to produce the food are also wasted, which takes a large toll on the environment. In the US, food production accounts for 10% of the total energy, 50% of land, and 80% of freshwater used. This is especially worrisome as the increasing world population, projected to reach 9.6 billion people by 2050, and unsustainable resource use may lead to food shortages.

Food waste also extends to social issues – Americans are throwing away the equivalent of $165 billion each year while 50 million people go hungry. Colleges alone waste 22 million pounds of food each year. This comes both from uneaten food on plates and from the excess food made by the kitchen to maintain a large selection and supply.

To help redistribute the excess food from the kitchen, GrOW (Olin’s sustainability club) has partnered with the Food Recovery Network. The Food Recovery Network is a non-profit organization that connects colleges to community organizations, donating the uneaten dining hall food to homeless shelters and food banks. We are in the process of setting up the collaboration, and will soon be reaching out for volunteers to help transport food. To learn more about this, contact Mackenzie Frackleton or stay tuned for further updates.

As for uneaten food, we are individually responsible for that. Soon GrOW will be holding the first of our weekly challenges about reducing individual food waste – so look out for more details. Next time you eat a meal, consider whether you will really eat everything you take. Let’s change our mindset around food and appreciate its value.